The word cyclic has appeared in three articles on nytimes.com in the past year, including on June 21 in the Opinion essay “What Killed Half a Million Indians?” by Pranay Sinha and Scott K. Heysell:

India’s underfunded health care system struggles to provide preventive care to Indians who need it most. Affluent Indians prefer and can afford private institutions. Poor Indians are more likely to avoid preventive care, be malnourished and endure poor living conditions. Unsurprisingly, they are also more likely to get sick. Illness saps their productivity and health care expenditure drains their savings, reinforcing a cyclic and generational poverty. Indeed, Indian children are among the most malnourished and stunted in the world. This physical and cognitive stunting decreases lifetime productivity and wages.